The Resurrection of Europe?

Something strange is happening in the heart of Europe. Something is stirring.

What is happening, what is stirring, is the stirring of the people of Europe against the decadent ascendancy that has ruled the roost for decades. The liberal elites don’t really understand the ordinary people, nor do they like them. They dismiss ideas that are popular with the people as “populist”, a term which is somehow supposed to connote something negative. Can such contempt for the “deplorable” majority be considered democratic in any meaningful sense?

There is no doubt that the natives of Europe are showing themselves to be decidedly restless. They are not happy with the secular humanism that the leaders of the corrupt European Union pass off as “Western values”. They are unhappy with radical relativism, which is a euphemism for rampant hedonism. They are beginning to realise that the politics of Pride is preceding the fall of those who advocate it.

They are looking for something else. Something better. Something healthier.

Many of the European people, millions of them, are seeking the political solutions offered by populist parties. This is fine, but it is not enough, nor is it ultimately the answer to Europe’s malaise, its decay. The only real and sustainable solution to Europe’s problems is a return to the real “western values” of Christendom. “Europe will return to the Faith,” wrote Hilaire Belloc, “or she will perish.” What is needed is a resurrection of the Europe of the Faith.

Thankfully, by the grace of God, many Europeans are beginning to understand and agree with the wisdom that Belloc espoused a century ago. More to the point, and thanks be to God, they are not merely understanding and agreeing with these words of wisdom but are acting upon it by returning to the Faith of their fathers.

This Easter, the Church in France baptized over 10,000 adults, an increase of 45% over the previous year. This is the highest number since the Catholic Church in France began keeping records. In addition to the 10,384 adult baptisms, a further 7,400 youths between the ages of 11 and 17 were also baptized. Even more encouraging is the fact that the average age of those seeking baptism and reception into the Church is getting younger.

According to the official report issued by the Church, there was now a “growing, and now majority, proportion of young people among all catechumens.” The 18-25-year-old group, made up of students and “young professionals”, constituted 42% of catechumens, surpassing the 26-40-year-old group. As for “adolescent catechumens”, those between the ages of 11 and 17, there was a 33% increase.

The dramatic increase in new converts to the Faith during the Easter liturgy was foreshadowed by an equally dramatic upsurge in attendance at Ash Wednesday services at the start of Lent. “We shattered attendance records,” Father Benoist de Sinety, parish priest of St. Eubert Church in Lille, told the French Catholic weekly, Famille Chrétienne. “Across the three Masses we offered, we had larger congregations than ever before. Nearly a thousand faithful gathered at Saint-Maurice Church in the evening — many of them young people attending for the first time.”

Similar good news was to be found across the Channel in the United Kingdom. According to a new survey conducted by the Bible Society, Catholics now make up 31% of all churchgoers in the UK, compared to 23% last time a similar survey was carried out in 2018. This is great news in itself, but it gets better. Among younger churchgoers, aged 18 to 35, the number of Catholics rises to 41%, whereas only 20% belonged to the Church of England and 18% identified as Pentecostal.

What are we to make of these figures?

In France, they indicate that an increasing number of young people do not agree with, or wish to conform to, the official laicité of the French Republic, which has its foundations in the anti-Christian dictates of the French Revolution. In the UK, it shows that the abject surrender of the Church of England to the spirit of the age, and especially to the ideology of Pride, has led to its dramatic implosion. Having broken with the tradition of Christendom in embracing the ordination of women and in waving rainbow flags, the Anglican Church has committed ecclesial suicide. In today’s England, a plethora of priestesses preside over empty churches devoid of congregations.

In brief and in sum, the Catholic revival in France indicates a rejection of radical secularism and a return to the Faith which had forged France as a nation. The parallel revival in England represents a similar rejection of radical secularism but also a rejection of the sort of theological modernism which abandons the Holy Spirit in favour of the Spirit of Age.

As for a final word on the moral and theological lessons to be learned from the revival of Catholicism and the implosion of Anglicanism, we might heed the wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, who said that we don’t want a Church that will move with the world but a Church that will move the world. And with respect to the restlessness of the people of Europe, we might also recall the words of St. Augustine that our hearts will be restless until they rest in Christ.

We will conclude, however, not with a final word from Chesterton or St. Augustine but with a final prayer from the poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had converted to the Faith during an earlier Catholic revival in the reign of Queen Victoria, having been received into the Church by another convert, St. John Henry Newman. At the conclusion of his poem, “The Wreck of The Deutschland”, Hopkins asks for the intercession of a Franciscan sister who had drowned during a shipwreck while witnessing to the love of Christ. His prayer for the intercession of the saints for the conversion of England expresses the hope of resurrection that this glorious season of the year promises and portends:

Dame, at our door
Drowned, and among our shoals,
Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:
Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls!
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.